Review: Blueberry Chex Cereal

Ready your best Oprah impression and say it with me: “You get a blueberry flavor! And you get a blueberry flavor! Everybody gets a blueberry flavor!

With the introduction of Very Berry Cheerios earlier this year, the recent rebranding of Blueberry Tiny Toast into Blueberry Toast Crunch, Cap’n Crunch’s Blueberry Pancake Crunch, the unexpected appearance of Kellogg’s Blueberry Lemon Special K, the inevitable return of Boo Berry in October, and now the dawn of gluten-free Blueberry Chex, it seems like 2017 is poised to be the year of the blue-but-mostly-indigo-but-pretty-much-purple-inside-berry.

That or General Mills just had a surplus harvest of pulverized blueberry flavor dust. In that case, I expect to see Chocolate Fondue Berry Cocoa Puffs and Reese’s Peanut Butter & Blueberry Jelly Puffs any day now.

But until such a gastronomical triumph is achieved, let’s content ourselves with these Smurf-kissed corn squares.

This new Blueberry Chex cereal really does look quite similar to those small sweet slices I’ve come to love—or at least half of them do, as this cereal features a bizarre yin yang split between innocently naked Chex bits and squares coated with so much blueberry sugar that their corny cross-hatches are plugged tighter than my toaster’s crumb catcher after a late-night BLT gauntlet.

Which happens more often than me, Aunt Millie, or Oscar Meyer would care to admit.

When eaten dry, Blueberry Chex tastes a lot like Blueberry Toast Crunch/Tiny Toast, too. It just has a far lighter and crispier crunch (despite its shape, never trap a prisoner in a fragile Chex cage), as well as a savory toasted rice base flavor that’s completely submissive to the ultraviolet dust glazed upon it. You can taste the iconic golden flavor of Rice Chex when eating the plain pieces, but the heavily dusted pieces are straight blueberry.

It’s a very wholesome and genuine blueberry taste, too, rather than the fruit snackish pectin pucker of some other blueberry breakfast products. Blueberry Chex is flavored with only honest berries, the kind you’d trust to feed your cats while you’re on vacation, keep their hands off your leftovers, and not yank the piñata up when you’re blindfolded and about to hit it. This cereal’s blueberry flavor still has a potently jelly-like flavor, but it also has the lighter berry notes of a blueberry smoothie and little of the slightly mouthwatering tartness of raw blueberry…essence? Blueberry spirit? Blueberry energy?

Forgive me: I’m writing this on a plane so I feel closer to the cosmic side of fruit philosophy.

While other Chex cereals go soggy quickly in milk, Blueberry Chex shines, both literally and flavorfully. Okay fine, it gets soggy pretty darn fast, too, but you likely won’t notice if you eat with the same Time Hortons-esque vigor that I did.

Why do I mention Tim Hortons? Because Blueberry Chex in milk tastes exactly like a bakery-fresh blueberry muffin. I know I exaggerate sometimes when comparing cereals to decadent desserts in order to provoke the theater of the mind—a corn puff will never be a lava cake no matter how many adjectives I use. But this stuff really does have the buttery baked ‘n’ browned dough flavor of a muffin, complete with occasionally explosive bursts of creamy, melty blueberry.

But that “occasionally” is the ultimate berry patch thorn in Blueberry Chex’s Achilles heel. Since there are essentially two kinds of Chex at play here, the forces of rice and blueberry tend to clash more often than they work together, producing bites have a blandly diluted berry taste in between juicier ones. As a blueberry fan, I think I’d find myself turning to Blueberry Toast Crunch over this any time for its more consistently bombastic blueberry sugar blasts.

That shouldn’t deter you from trying Blueberry Chex at least once, though. Its reasonable savory-sugary balance will be sure to satisfy berry fans who want a more sensibly sweet breakfast, while its in-milk muffin magic is worth the price of admission alone. If General Mills keeps producing blueberry cereals of this high quality, then I don’t care how many Lucky Charms or Cookie Crisps they coat in pale violet fairy dust.

Sorry, loganberries: maybe 2018 will be your year.

The Bowl: Blueberry Chex Cereal

The Breakdown: It stays smoothly (and smoothie-ly) true to its namesake fruit, while becoming a moist muffin when milk enters the mix, but Blueberry Chex’s half-naked, half-dressed piece gambit ultimately works to its detriment when placed alongside its Toast Crunchier brother.

What’s deterring me from trying this or Blueberry Toast Crunch or Special K Blueberry with lemon is they’re not available in my part of Ohio! I’m still licking my wounds from never being able to find or try the Cap’n Crunch Orange Creampop cereal last year and I fear that I will suffer a similar fate with these blueberry cereals :/

I love chex, plain is good, honey and vanilla are great, but cinnamon is my favorite! Just tried blueberry, and Im not a fan. 🙁 sorry but something is sadly off with this stuff – its almost, but not quite bitter? Or, I don’t know… something just tastes ugh.

Probably due to the fact that I live about 5 miles north of General Mills/Pillsbury headquarters, I tend to be drawn to their products, but I’ve actually been eating Rice Chex on and off since high school (think early 1980s) when Chex was still owned and distributed by Ralston Purina (yes, THAT Purina). And for the past year or so, I’ve been throwing a handful of Cinnamon Chex into my bowl of Rice Chex to give it a little kick.

So when I saw Blueberry Chex on the shelf this afternoon, I decided to grab a box to try, although I’ll likely just substitute it instead of the Cinnamon Chex in my Rice Chex.

It just hit the shelves in Los Angeles around December 2017. I am unable to find it now at the end of January. I figure all of the new dispensaries have stocked up on it in anticipation of demand. It better not be a temporary flavor. By far, one of the best cereals ever created. It made me go out and try their other flavors… which are niiiice, but not even close to the heaven that is represented by this well-rounded industrial food-scientist blueberry formula flavor. If you told me right now that it was giving me Martian Mumps, I would still order a truckload.

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